Design Ideas: An app for shopping your conscience

An online journal about visual art, the urban landscape and design. Mary Louise Schumacher, the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic, leads the discussion and a community of writers contribute to the dialogue.

There are a multitude of apps that I can call up on my iPhone to aid and abet certain shopping habits. From finding a good price on a book to watching a deal on an antique buffet to selecting the most nutritious box of cereal, there is indeed an app for that. But a new, free iPhone app promises to put financial accountability for the brands that I buy at my fingertips, too.

With BizVizz, I should be able to snap pictures of jars of peanut butter or boxes of crackers on grocery store shelves and determine whether the companies that make them are paying their fair share of taxes.

Maybe it’s the transparency-loving journalist in me, but I certainly liked the idea of getting that kind of quick access to data, to see which brands seemed to be carrying their weight, so to speak, and which ones were not. Would I be in a position to “shop my values,” as the app developers suggest?

I decided to experiment first in my own kitchen cabinets. I pulled a can of Swanson vegetable broth down from the shelf. The app scanned the image and whisked me off to a page with information about Swanson’s parent company, Campbell’s Soup, of which Swanson is a sub-brand. According to the app, the tax rate for the Mmm-Mmm-Good corporation is 18.9%, below the industry average of 23.4%.

With a tap or two, it showed me how the brand’s competitors stacked up, too. H.J. Heinz had the lowest tax rate, just 4.7%, while Hershey, Smucker’s and Hormel were well above the industry average.

BizVizz also offered data on how much Campbell’s got in government subsidies and gave in campaign contributions and to which parties. According to the app, the soup giant got more than $38 million in subsidies and gave more than three-quarters of its political contributions to Republicans.

Next up, I snapped a shot of a jar of honey with "365 Organic" emblazoned on it. The app scanned the image and came up with the right name but didn’t find the Whole Foods brand. For that, I had to do a text search.

According to BizVizz, Whole Foods’ tax rate is 36.3%, quite a bit higher than the industry average of 30%. The industry comparisons in this case seemed a little more wide-ranging. Whole Foods was being compared with Amazon.com, Big Lots, RadioShack, Home Depot and Nordstrom. The organic food company gives most of its political contributions to Democrats, but when you drill down for more information, you see that both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were among top gift-getters.

Some brands, like my Nature's Path Q’ia cereal and Wallaby Greek yogurt, didn’t come up at all. Some small, local and international brands won't be in the app's database -- at least for now. The app has about 900 major brands and the developers say they'll expand beyond that.

In truth, all of this is still just a starting point. I have no idea, for instance, why — or how — General Electric could have a tax rate of negative 45.3%. Are some of these corporations taking advantage of loopholes or just being smart about their business? That will require more information and a point of view to determine. Still, I like the idea of consumers being armed in this way.

BizVizz was released last month by Brad Lichtenstein, a Milwaukee filmmaker and director of the documentary “As Goes Janesville.” It was launched as part of a community outreach aspect of that project. The data the app uses is from Citizens for Tax Justic, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on the development of tax laws. Other partners include the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the AFL-CIO, the he Independent Television Service, the Sunlight Foundation, Working Films and Kartemquin Films.

Mary Louise Schumacher is the Journal Sentinel’s art and architecture critic. She brainstorms ideas for Design Ideas with design-minded Milwaukeeans on Pinterest.

About Mary Louise Schumacher

Mary Louise Schumacher is the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic. She writes about culture, design, the urban landscape and Milwaukee's creative community. Art City is her award-winning cultural page and a community of more than 20 contributing writers and artists. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram.

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